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City taps Perkins Eastman to research alternatives to Rikers

Design Gaols

City taps Perkins Eastman to research alternatives to Rikers

City taps Perkins Eastman to research alternatives to Rikers. Pictured here: Rikers Island in 2012. (Doc Searls/Flickr)

New York City has tapped Perkins Eastman to study the design and location of new city jails to replace Rikers Island, the detention facility that’s slated for shutdown over the next decade.

The ten-month, almost $7.6 million contract asks the New York firm to study three existing jails in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. The architects will look at sites for new detention facilities, especially in the Bronx, where the borough’s main facility is “the Boat,” a jail on the barge in the East River.

Perkins Eastman selected 17 subcontractors to assist with the project, including Atelier TenWSP (formerly WSP | Parsons Brinkerhoff), W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, and RicciGreene Associates, a New York firm that specializes in jails. Community engagement consultants Fitzgerald & Halliday and the Osborne Association, a nonprofit that serves justice-involved individuals, are the only non-engineering, architecture, real estate development, or planning firms on the list. Along with these collaborators and the city, Perkins Eastman will reach out to neighborhood groups, study the environmental impact of the jails, and ideate on designs. This will be the firm’s first detention facilities project.

“The physical expressions of what jails look like, where they’re located, and what happens inside of them will determine what kind of system we’ll have, and it’s critical that we’re thinking about jails not as places that are far away on islands and hard to get to, but as part of the ebb and flow of a neighborhood,” said Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, in a prepared statement.

The borough-based facilities will be integrated with their neighborhoods, in contrast to Rikers, and they will be designed to accommodate education, vocational, health, and re-entry services to inmates. At the end of the study, which is officially the pre-schematic design services for a forthcoming citywide jail services master plan, the team is expected to produce three conceptual designs, complete with plans, sections, elevations, and renderings, along with cost estimates.

Last November, the city issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the study, and Perkins Eastman was selected from four eligible respondents. Although the Department of Correction (DOC) is the lead agency on this study, the RFP was initiated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), and the DOC.

The news comes as the Rikers shutdown, announced last year, begins in earnest. In early January the city announced it will be closing the first of ten jails on the island this summer. Right now, there are about 8,700 people in jails citywide, but the city says it needs less than 5,000 inmates to close Rikers for good.

Perkins Eastman Spokesperson Amber Zilemba confirmed that work should begin shortly.

[H/T The Wall Street Journal]

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